Updated Google's Gmail has once again plummeted out of the cloud and the company is scurrying to fix the problem nearly an hour after it went titsup.

The email service hit the buffers at around 10:15am GMT, and, at time of writing, it hasn't flickered back to life yet.

A Google spokesman declined to speculate on how many people worldwide were currently affected by the outage and was also unable to tell us when the service might be back up and running again.

Instead he read us a standard statement:

"A number of users are having difficulty accessing Gmail. We're working to resolve the problem now. We know how important Gmail is to our users so we take this issue very seriously and we apologise for the inconvenience."

Google engineers are attempting to fix the problem now, in the meantime users can keep hitting F5 on this status page to get updates about the technical FAIL.

This is Google's latest major outage to scupper both its paid and free email services. In October Gmail was out of action for more than a day, much to the chagrin of its users.

We'll update you as soon as we hear more. ®

Update

Some users are reporting that Gmail is slowly coming back to life, while many others are pointing out that Imap access via a desktop client or through their iPhone or other handset apps has been running fine this morning.

Meanwhile, Google has now put out a statement penned by its site reliability boss Acacio Cruz on the firm's official blog:

"If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

"We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails."

Update 2

Google has confirmed that Gmail is now back up and running following this morning's major outage.

"The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored," said the company.

Some users noticed that the service requested a Captcha when Gmail came back online, which could point to a virus or spyware app as being the possible culprit behind Google's email woe.

However, the web kingpin is yet to provide any comment on what caused the downtime.

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